Curiosity Recovering from Memory Glitch

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Curiosity Recovering from Memory Glitch

PASADENA, Calif. (WHNT) – Mars rover Curiosity tweeted today, “Thanks for the well wishes! I’m out of “safe mode” and expect to resume full operations next week.”

Last week, Curiosity suffered from a memory glitch that required the rover to be rebooted in to a precautionary “safe mode.”

“We are making good progress in the recovery,” said Mars Science Laboratory Project Manager Richard Cook, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Curiosity’s operators switched the rover to a redundant onboard computer, the rover’s “B-side” computer, on Feb. 28 when the “A-side” computer that the rover had been using demonstrated symptoms of a corrupted memory location. The intentional side swap put the rover, as anticipated, into minimal-activity safe mode.

“One path of progress is evaluating the A-side with intent to recover it as a backup. Also, we need to go through a series of steps with the B-side, such as informing the computer about the state of the rover — the position of the arm, the position of the mast, that kind of information,” said Cook.